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entropical
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 Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 3:39 pm Post subject: This Election Will Change the World.. |
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The Shia Will Inherit Iraq
This Election Will Change the World, But Not in the Way the US Wanted
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Baghdad.
Shias are about to inherit Iraq, but the election tomorrow that will bring them to power is creating deep fears among the Arab kings and dictators of the Middle East that their Sunni leadership is under threat.
America has insisted on these elections--which will produce a largely Shia parliament representing Iraq's largest religious community--because they are supposed to provide an exit strategy for embattled US forces, but they seem set to change the geopolitical map of the Arab world in ways the Americans could never have imagined. For George Bush and Tony Blair this is the law of unintended consequences writ large.
Amid curfews, frontier closures and country-wide travel restrictions, voting in Iraq will begin tomorrow under the threat of Osama bin Laden's ruling that the poll represents an "apostasy". Voting started among expatriate Iraqis yesterday in Britain, the US, Sweden, Syria and other countries, but the turnout was much smaller than expected.
The Americans have talked up the possibility of massive bloodshed tomorrow and US intelligence authorities have warned embassy staff in Baghdad that insurgents may have been "saving up" suicide bombers for mass attacks on polling stations.
But outside Iraq, Arab leaders are talking of a Shia "Crescent" that will run from Iran through Iraq to Lebanon via Syria, whose Alawite leadership forms a branch of Shia Islam. The underdogs of the Middle East, repressed under the Ottomans, the British and then the pro-Western dictators of the region, will be a new and potent political force.
While Shia political parties in Iraq have promised that they will not demand an Islamic republic--their speeches suggest that they have no desire to recreate the Iranian revolution in their country--their inevitable victory in an election that Iraq's Sunnis will largely boycott mean that this country will become the first Arab nation to be led by Shias.
On the surface, this may not be apparent; Iyad Allawi, the former CIA agent and current Shia "interim" Prime Minister, is widely tipped as the only viable choice for the next prime minister--but the kings and emirs of the Gulf are facing the prospect with trepidation.
In Bahrain, a Sunni monarchy rules over a Shia majority that staged a mini-insurrection in the 1990s. Saudi Arabia has long treated its Shia minority with suspicion and repression.
In the Arab world, they say that God favoured the Shia with oil. Shias live above the richest oil reserves in Saudi Arabia and upon some of the Kuwaiti oil fields. Apart from Mosul, Iraqi Shias live almost exclusively amid their own country's massive oil fields. Iran's oil wealth is controlled by the country's overwhelming Shia majority.
What does all this presage for the Sunni potentates of the Arabian peninsula? Iraq's new national assembly and the next interim government it selects will empower Shias throughout the region, inviting them to question why they too cannot be given a fair share of their country's decision-making.
The Americans originally feared that parliamentary elections in Iraq would create a Shia Islamic republic and made inevitable--and unnecessary--warnings to Iran not to interfere in Iraq. But now they are far more frightened that without elections the 60 per cent Shia community would join the Sunni insurgency.
Tomorrow's poll is thus, for the Americans, a means to an end, a way of claiming that--while Iraq may not have become the stable, liberal democracy they claimed they would create--it has started its journey on the way to Western-style freedom and that American forces can leave.
Few in Iraq believe that these elections will end the insurgency, let alone bring peace and stability. By holding the poll now--when the Shias, who are not fighting the Americans, are voting while the Sunnis, who are fighting the Americans, are not--the elections can only sharpen the divisions between the country's two largest communities.
While Washington had clearly not envisaged the results of its invasion in this way, its demand for "democracy" is now moving the tectonic plates of the Middle East in a new and uncertain direction. The Arab states outside the Shia "Crescent" fear Shia political power even more than they are frightened by genuine democracy.
No wonder, then, King Abdullah of Jordan is warning that this could destabilise the Gulf and pose a "challenge" to the United States. This may also account for the tolerant attitude of Jordan towards the insurgency, many of whose leaders freely cross the border with Iraq.
The American claim that they move secretly from Syria into Iraq appears largely false; the men who run the rebellion against US rule in Iraq are not likely to smuggle themselves across the Syrian-Iraqi desert when they can travel "legally" across the Jordanian border.
Tomorrow's election may be bloody. It may well produce a parliament so top-heavy with Shia candidates that the Americans will be tempted to "top up" the Sunni assembly members by choosing some of their own, who will inevitably be accused of collaboration. But it will establish Shia power in Iraq--and in the wider Arab world--for the first time since the great split between Sunnis and Shias that followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad. |
_________________
"Rastafari is not a faith which can be converted to. No one person can say, 'This is exactly what the Rastafari doctrine is,' because the beauty of the faith is that it is seen through the eyes of the beholder...it is a way of life, which, like life itself, continues to grow in mind, body and spirit." |
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entropical
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| Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2005 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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January 31, 2005
No One Believes the Insurgency Will End
Amid Tragedy, Defiance
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Baghdad.
Even as the explosions thundered over Baghdad, the people came in their hundreds and then in their thousands. Entire families, crippled old men supported by their sons, children beside them, babies in the arms of their mothers, sisters and aunts and cousins.
That is how the Shia Muslims of Baghdad voted yesterday. They walked quietly to the Martyr Mohamed Bakr Hakim School in Jadriya, without talking, through the car-less streets, the air pressure changing around them as mortars rained down on the US and British embassy compounds and the first of the day's suicide bombers immolated himself and his victims--most of them Shias--two miles away.
The Kurds voted, too, in their tens of thousands, but the Sunnis--20 per cent of Iraq's population, whose insurgency was the principal reason for this election--boycotted or were intimidated from the polling stations.
The turnout--estimated at 60 per cent of Iraq's 15 million registered voters--represented victory and tragedy. For while the Shias voted in their millions with immense courage, the Sunni voice of Iraq remained silent, casting into semi-illegitimacy the national assembly whose existence is supposed to provide America with a political excuse to extricate itself from its "little Vietnam" in the Middle East.
And yes, of course, there was the violence we all expected. There were to be nine suicide bombers in Baghdad--the largest number on a single day anywhere in the Middle East.
An American mercenary and a US soldier were among the first to die in Baghdad when mortars exploded, then more than 20 voters--four slaughtered beside a polling station in Sadr City--were cut down; before dusk came news that an RAF C-130 Hercules transport aircraft had crashed 25 miles north-west of Baghdad, en route to the largely insurgent-held city of Balad, the site of a big US airbase. In all, almost 50 men and women were killed across Iraq.
But how many were killed on the RAF aircraft? Tony Blair's strangely fearful statement about the election last night acknowledged some dead, but would give no other details. Why not? Were there three British crew dead? Or five? Or many, many more? And were there US passengers? President Bush also referred to US dead, as if it included more than the two killed in the morning. Was there something that might be revealed today, when the "success" of the elections had been polished without a tragedy to tarnish it?
Of course, it was the sight of thousands of Shias, the women in black "hijab" covering, the men in leather jackets or long robes, the children toddling beside them, that took the breath away. If Osama bin Laden had called these elections an apostasy, many did not heed his Wahabi threats. They came to claim their rightful power in the land--that is why Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the grand marja of the Shias of Iraq, told them to vote--and woe betide the US and British if they do not get it.
For if this election produces a parliamentary coalition that splits the Shias and turns their largest party into the opposition, then the Sunni insurgency will become a national uprising.
"I came here," a man told me in Jadriya, "because our grand marja told us voting today was more important than prayer and fasting." Even the local election agent was close to tears. Taleb Ibrahim admitted to me that he had participated in Saddam's one-man elections but this day marked the moment when the Shias--after refusing to take revenge on their Baathist oppressors--would show magnanimity.
Even if the Sunnis were boycotting the poll, he said, "there is an old saying that 'if the father becomes angry, we will have no problems with his sons'. We will make sure that these sons, the Sunnis, have equal rights with us." At one polling station, I asked the first of the young Iraqi soldiers who were to check us--all, I should add, wore black woollen face masks so that they could never be identified--if he was frightened. "It doesn't matter," he said very firmly. "I am ready to die for this day. We have got to vote." Seven hours later, I talked to him again and now he, too, had the indelible ink on his forefinger. "It's like you can change your future or your faith," he said. "We only had military coups and revolutions before. We voted 'yes' or 'yes'. Now we vote for ourselves."
It was easy to be maudlin about such words, to imbibe the false optimism of the Western television networks and the nonsense about Iraq's "historic" day--for it will only have been historic if it changes this country, and many fear it will not.
No one I met yesterday believes the insurgency will end. Many thought it would grow more ferocious and the Shias in the polling stations said with one voice that they were also voting to rid Iraq of the Americans, not to legitimise their presence.
On the streets yesterday, the Americans deployed thousands of troops, most of them trying to show some respect for the people. A certain Captain Buchanan from Arkansas even ventured a political thought. "It's a pity the Sunnis aren't voting--it's their loss," he said. But of course it is also Iraq's loss and, in a direct way, the Shias' loss too--and possibly America's. For without that vital minority component, who will believe in the new parliament or the constitution it is supposed to produce or the next government it is supposed to create?
I asked a Sunni Muslim security guard yesterday what he thought would be the future of his country. He had not voted, of course--in many Sunni cities, only a third of the polling stations opened--but he had thought a lot about the question.
"You cannot give us 'democracy' just like this," he said. "That is one of your Western, foreign dreams. Before, we had Saddam and he was a cruel man and he treated us cruelly. But what will happen after this election is that you will give us lots of little Saddams." |
_________________
"Rastafari is not a faith which can be converted to. No one person can say, 'This is exactly what the Rastafari doctrine is,' because the beauty of the faith is that it is seen through the eyes of the beholder...it is a way of life, which, like life itself, continues to grow in mind, body and spirit." |
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